Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The 26 films and videotapes in this program were selected based on an intuitive, personal notion of "poetry". I found it very natural to choose these works. I have found it much harder to find an appropriate definition of "poetic". One common interest of all of the works chosen is a reference to memory, often to dreams and to a past. Another specification that I looked for was a strong connection of sound to image and image to sound. A quote from the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard has helped me to place these films and tapes and my relationship to them as "reader". Bachelard explains that the poetic image "is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away" (from The Poetics of Space).

Just as film or television has traditionally introduced dream or memory through a cloudy screen, the past enters artists' works through filters - the film grain of Jem Cohen's images, the video snow of Terese Svoboda 's tape, the landscape, electronically painted by Shalom Gorewitz. It is introduced through the echoing footsteps in Truth Story, the tango music in La Vida Es Una Llrida Absurda, the sound of waves on rock in The Big Sleep. It is present in Lana Lin 's archival footage, and Tom Kalin's home movies. It is in the descriptions offered by the artists. Shalom Gorewitz writes, "I live at the foothill of Mount Tremper, home of a Zen monestary in New York. Zen Jewish since the 1960's."

Looking back at the program, I see works that may easily fit traditional notions of the poetic and others which serve to challenge our preconceptions of what is poetic. In the last five years, or so, in The United States, classically lyrical (poetic) works have received far less support than they did in the Eighties. An easy critique is always form over content. Strong political content has driven much of the more celebrated works, some of which sacrificed form for content. There are some that may be less obviously considered as "poetic" works, such as the agressive and sexually charged words and images of John Lindehl and resonant poetic language where - as is fitting -form is a reflection of content.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "10th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival": 20th to 25th November 1994, São Paulo, Brazil, 1994.